A former New South Wales transport bureaucrat has confessed to receiving envelopes of cash at an Oporto fast-food restaurant as part of an alleged multimillion-dollar kickback scheme. Ibrahim Helmy, 38, appeared before the Independent Commission Against Corruption (Icac) on Thursday, admitting he created fake invoices to inflate payments from the state's roads agency.
Helmy told the hearing he asked Complete Linemarking, a contractor, to send invoices to his private email so he could alter them with inflated figures. The doctored invoices were then submitted to the former Roads and Maritime Services (RMS), where he worked as a project engineer. A spreadsheet showed the original amounts, inflated amounts, the difference, and the proposed split between the two parties.
The commission heard that Helmy often received cash at the Oporto restaurant in Wetherill Park, western Sydney, including from Complete Linemarking part-owner Peter Jankulovski. In one message, Helmy wrote: “Ok cool, at the back of Oportos.” An image shown to the hearing depicted several envelopes of cash on a tiger-print bedspread, which Helmy identified as from his former home.
Helmy also admitted to scanning invoices at his RMS office and altering them to create fake invoices for traffic control services, providing a paper trail for withdrawals to pay him. The relationship with Complete Linemarking deteriorated by June 2020, with Helmy telling an alleged co-conspirator, Peter Le, “I want to fuck off complete linemarking”.
The hearing also revealed Helmy's frequent use of the word “penis” in texts with Le, which he initially claimed was an autocorrect but later admitted was “just some joke”. Helmy allegedly wrote emails from Le's account to simulate correspondence about contract tenders. In a separate incident, Helmy texted Le after a meeting with a contractor's operations manager, saying he had “tried to do a deal” and that things would “get juicy and more detailed”.
